“It was a highly demanding school for our society...”

As usual, The Day is starting to take stock of this year’s events in politics, philosophy, culture, foreign policy and defense. 2014 was the year of the Crimea annexation and the Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, which affected not only the political situation in our country, but also that of Europe. The Day’s call for comments on foreign policy results of the year was answered on December 16 by statesman Yevhen Marchuk, a former foreign minister Volodymyr Ohryzko, and a former ambassador of Ukraine to China and Japan Yurii Kostenko. Each of them is an authoritative expert, respectively on security, foreign policy, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Speaking of the security sector, Marchuk, who has extensive experience in government positions and has recently been appointed to lead the International Secretariat on Security and Civil Cooperation Ukraine-NATO and Ukraine-EU, noted that “the greatest positive result of this year, albeit stemming from tragic events, is it being a highly demanding school for the public, the state, our politicians, functionaries at all levels, as they learned to understand what the state and the modern world were, and how to manage the state to guarantee its security.”

Ohryzko saw as a foreign policy positive of this year the fact that after the Russian aggression, “politicians in the West and the East had an eye-opening experience, and their Ukrainian counterparts had even more of it because of what happened in the West.” He said that when it comes to the Ukrainian foreign policy, we had finally realized that we should set our priorities clearly and loudly: the EU if we mean the EU, and NATO if we mean it as well.

Kostenko, an ambassador with years of experience in the Asian and Pacific region, drew attention to the fact that by abstaining from voting in the UN Security Council when it tried to condemn the Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, China painted itself into a corner. He also revealed what allies Ukraine could expect to find in the region and what to do to put substance into its strategic partnership with China.